Having worked as a journalist for the past 15 years, I have met quite a few people with heart-rending stories to tell, and whose courage in overcoming adversity has been extraordinary. But some of the people whose experiences have moved me the most I have met right here in the UK, and they are children.

I first met Meltem Avcil in Yarl's Wood detention centre near Bedford last year, when [...]

I'm sitting in a café in a grimy part of north London, whose exact location I can't tell you, drinking coffee with a man whose name I can't reveal. This man - I'll call him Ahmed - is apparently so dangerous that our government is not only eager to deport him to Algeria, but is keeping him under a kind of house arrest in the interim.

Ahmed's movements have been [...]

Angélique, a tired-eyed woman in her twenties, seems to be exhausted by telling her story. We are sitting in a greasy London café eating chips and chops, and the more she tells, the more I want to ask. So she goes on narrating, in her lilting French, the story of why she came to this country all the way from the Democratic Republic of Congo a few years ago. Her [...]

In the long winter that froze the early months of 1963 - one of the coldest of the 20th century - a few people were fanning flames of rebellion. They were peace activists - and anarchists and socialists - who wanted to challenge the power of the military state but to go beyond yet another mass march or yet another sit-down. They had heard through various contacts about a secret [...]